{alltv} JT thanks 'SNL' for funny roles

LOS ANGELES -- Move over Jessica Biel, if indeed you're still in the picture.

Justin Timberlake is in love with an older woman.

"I'm in love with Patricia Clarkson," he says of the veteran character actress who plays the irresponsibly free-spirited mom of his leading lady Mila Kunis in the ambivalent romantic comedy Friends With Benefits.

"Just the idea she might be around the corner freaks me out. I start sweating. She's like a goddess to me. It's like she has pixie dust around her."

Strong talk from a guy whose personal life we've been warned not to invade in interviews.

But Clarkson had a crucial part to play in the "comedification" (OK, I made up that word) of Timberlake. She played his mom in Mother Lover, the rude and crude Saturday Night Live video in which he and Andy Samberg decide that, ahem, "mom-swapping" would be a perfect Mother's Day gift (Susan Sarandon played Samberg's mom). Look it up on YouTube. 'Nuff said.

That combined with their previous SNL viral video D--- In A Box, and numerous SNL sketches, provided Timberlake with serious cred as a comic actor.

"I actually owe any chance I ever get in a comedy film to SNL," says Timberlake, who's also been cadging laughs of late opposite ex-girlfriend Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher. "I ended up in meetings with comedy directors and producers because of SNL."

(For her part, Clarkson shares the opinion. Her first scene in the film has her walking in on Kunis and Timberlake naked. "I said to (director Will Gluck), 'Will, my very first scene, I get to walk into a room with two very beautiful people naked!' And not that seeing Mila naked is not a lovely thing, but seeing Justin naked was a really, really, really wonderful thing," she says with a throaty laugh.)

Replete with texting, sexting and even flash mobs as plot devices, Friends With Benefits is a fast-talking age-of-irony romantic comedy that pokes fun at the very concept of romance. Dylan (Timberlake) is a magazine designer headhunted for GQ by Jamie (Kunis). They obviously like each other's company, but are both so cynical and conditioned to recognize everything about relationships as cliché, they decide to see if "just sex" will work.

Even as they develop real feelings, they won't admit to them under pain of torture.

"It's about the death of romance in the age of 'hookups,' " says co-screenwriter David A. Newman. "It's emblematic of the times. People are afraid to be honest and open about emotion. I have friends who've been together for years and they insist they're still 'hanging out.' Well, you're not! That's something you do for two weeks."

Timberlake, whose love life has been mapped out in the tabs from Britney Spears to Diaz to Biel to all points in between, seconds that non-emotion.

"I looked at it, not as a romantic comedy, but as a generational comedy about romance," he says. "I think we were hoping to speak from our perspective and we injected our points of view into the characters.

"When I watch this movie, that's what I feel our generation had to grow up with. I hope we have grown up with the falsification of romance through ridiculous romantic comedies," says Timberlake, who points to When Harry Met Sally and the work of John Hughes as examples of relationship films that got it right.

During filming, Timberlake and Kunis shared a private joke that both their careers were based on low expectations (as in, 'Wow, I was surprised at how good he was in The Social Network') -- he carrying a decade-old "boy band" taint, and she carrying the reputation of "sitcom actress" from her years on That '70s Show.

Expectations may be building all around him. In recent months, director Gluck has seen both Timberlake and Kunis on the cover of Vanity Fair, as well as Emma Stone from his earlier Easy A (Stone has a cameo in Friends With Benefits as well). "I think I was lucky enough to be there at the right moment with all these actors," Gluck says. "Justin is a great actor, and I want people after this movie to stop looking at the screen and thinking, 'That's Justin Timberlake!' And I think you do after about a minute-10 in this movie."

Timberlake shrugs off his own observation. "I don't think other people's expectations matter all that much. You deal more and more with people that shouldn't have an opinion and do. Most of them sit at computers and write things like, 'That sucks!'

"I'll say that with my second album (FutureSex/LoveSounds), for instance, I had a way higher expectation of what it was going to be. And I sort of did something that I thought was true to the moment for me and an extension of an idea. And what I found was that it surprised a lot of people.

"But everything I've always done has been pretty theatrical. The way I create music is through a character, it's not who I am by any means. I don't think you can ever be defined by one song or one movie or even one sketch on SNL."

He admits, though, "I'll always be grateful for my crazy connection to SNL, emotionally, because I grew up with it and it's such a part of my family and how I relate to the men in my family.

"All the guys in my family are funny guys, and I only just ever wanted to make them laugh when I was a kid. SNL sort of cemented that link."

Friend sex films a new trend?

Some years there are two movies about volcanoes, or meteors striking the Earth, or even about Truman Capote.

This year, there are two movies about a guy and a girl who decide to experiment with a "just sex" relationship -- each featuring one of the stars of Black Swan. There was No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, and now there's Friends With Benefits, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.

The twist: No Strings Attached went into production with the title Friends With Benefits (the original title, apparently, was F--- Buddies). That was until Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, the writers of the current Friends With Benefits, heard about it.

"We were smart enough (beforehand) to register the title and had the studio register it with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)," Newman says. "As a consequence, we reclaimed the title."

Still, Merryman says, "we thought we were done. It killed us when that other film went into production."

"We'd be at cocktail parties and we'd say we wrote Friends With Benefits, and they'd say, 'Oh, the movie with Ashton Kutcher.' And we'd say no. And they'd say, 'Oh, you're THOSE guys.' And I was like, 'Oh my God, we're THOSE guys!'"

And no, they never saw No Strings Attached. "We couldn't bring ourselves to see it," Merryman says.

"I think our movies are very different," says Friends With Benefits director Will Gluck. "People say they're two movies about the same thing. But this movie is about a relationship between a guy and a girl, the 10,000th movie on the subject. It isn't Volcano and Dante's Peak."

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